Fall to Thrive
by Kihin Ranno
Summary: Once, Jadeite told him that illusion was the first of all pleasures. Kunzite now must see if pleasure is enough to thrive on.


Fall to Thrive  
Written for the Sailor Moon Monthly Fanfiction Challenge at LiveJournal  
January 2008: Silver Millennium - Day Thirteen: "Illusion is the first of all pleasures." -- Oscar Wilde  
Submitted for Venus/Kunzite Claim at Fanfic100  
Prompt #34: Not Enough  
by Kihin Ranno  
1/1

The sun was warm on his face and the rest of the world almost silent around him. He was lounging for what felt like the first time in decades, and he was absolutely sure that there was nothing that needed his attention. Everything was taken care of; he could relax and he didn't feel guilty, tense, or restless. He was absolutely, blissfully exanimate.

It was the best feeling in the world.

Kunzite grunted as a sudden weight fell upon his chest. He opened one eye, bringing his eyebrows closer together when he saw the culprit. All gold and smiles, she grinned at him just like Zoisite did every time he came up with a supposedly brilliant idea. Kunzite was about as skeptical of her as he was of his comrade.

"You will find that I do not make a very good pillow." He smirked, almost wishing that his prince were in earshot. "My stomach isn't as soft as Endymion's."

It took exactly a third of a second for Venus's eyes to light up in wicked pleasure. "Firm is better than soft."

"I had gathered you felt that way."

Her ankles rose off the ground, crossing in midair and exposing her legs from underneath her dress. She swung them back and forth, feigning oblivion. They both knew better.

"What are you doing?"

"_Nothing_," he said, his voice almost rapturous.

Venus gasped and clutched at pearls that weren't there. "Do my ears deceive me or has the great and anal Lord Kunzite just admitted to languishing?"

He raised an eyebrow at her description, but ultimately refrained from comment. "Have I shattered your precarious worldview?"

"Well, you have proven that the impossible can actually occur," Venus insisted, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "That's enough to lay a mighty oak flat."

Kunzite snorted quietly. "There you are, bringing in phallic symbols where they aren't warranted."

There was that wickedness again, but then that's what he'd been looking for. She leaned forward, her lips barely brushing against his ear. "Darling, phallic symbols are always warranted." She paused and repositioned herself so that her hips were flush against his own. "But I do prefer the real thing."

Before she could bite his ear, he flipped her on her back, his knee between her legs. Her laugh was glory.

"I'd gathered that as well," he murmured, his lips finding the mole on the side of her neck.

She started to turn away. "No, no. I shouldn't."

He pulled her back. "I think you definitely should."

She sighed melodramatically as it was the only way she could possibly sigh. "But I've interrupted your lazy time, and you really don't get enough of it. I should have just let you nap."

"As you mention at every available opportunity, we rarely have enough time for _this_ either."

"Rest is important, you know," she pointed out, sounding very serious. "Helps keep up your stamina, and let me tell you, there is nothing worse than lost stamina."

"I believe there is also some sort of adage about how practice makes perfect," he said, and then it was his turn to bite her ear.

She squealed and jumped. "My, we are feisty today."

His lips went back to her neck, and this time, he watched her eyelids flutter. "Don't waste all your energy playing hard to get when we both know where this is going."

She chuckled. "Sometimes it's fun this way."

He was about to come back at her with something, but Venus rarely needed to be told anything twice. She turned her head like a serpent striking, her lips seeking out his own. There was lightning in her movement, electricity in skin, and a gentle giggle sounding at the back of her throat. Her arms wound around his neck, drawing them closer together, and soon, all thoughts of listless days fled his mind, and all he could think of was her ankles crossed around his waist and her eyelids fluttering to the sound of her screams.

The best feeling in the world.

-----

A rip, a tear, a gash that split him wide. Not rivers but oceans of blood seemed to splatter on the floor, and it was all he could do not to shout.

A pair of yellow eyes surrounded by flame-hair glared at him, a dagger or shattered glass in her hand. "Not fair being unconscious for this part, Kunzite. It's far less effective."

Once, Jadeite told him that illusion was the first of all pleasures. Infants dreamed in shape and color long before they could form a single syllable. Children played pretend. Adolescents drifted away from lessons and placed themselves in a better world without arithmetic or etiquette. Even grown men retreat to secret places within their mind.

Sometimes, it was the only way to escape.

Kunzite swallowed even though he hadn't had water in days. He glanced down at his exposed torso, measuring the damage with as detached an eye as he could muster. All his years of fighting and still the sight of his own flesh shook him somewhere down deep. Good as he was, there was only so much he could take.

He wiped his slick brow against his left arm. His hands were tied together and suspended over his head, strung up so high that his feet could scarcely touch the ground. His fingers were purple and they had been for a long time.

"I think I can live with that," Kunzite pronounced, finding the witch in the dark again.

Rather than scoff, Beryl's hand darted forward and took a chunk out of his side. He hadn't been expecting her to retaliate so quickly, and this time, he couldn't suppress his outcry.

"This isn't about living and dying," Beryl reminded him.

"Of course," Kunzite hissed, fighting to keep his breath steady. "You're torturing me out of the goodness of your heart."

"What is good and what is right do not always align," Beryl pronounced. "I believe you've said as much in times of war."

Kunzite glared. There was only so much banter he could sustain with his captor when so much of his life was on the floor. "I see no infantry. I see no battlements. I see nothing resembling a war in here. Just a witch twisting good men to suit her own purposes."

His right cheek, one of the few spots that had been lacking a wound, now bled just as freely as so man other places. "A general lectures me on the art of war, and he is ignorant," she sighed, shaking her head. "You disappoint me, Kunzite."

"So sorry," he growled.

Beryl looked at him, acting as though she were gauging the level of his sincerity. "I could make this so much easier for you."

"I prefer the hard way," Kunzite assured her, his teeth still clenched hard enough to crack.

Her eyes narrowed, giving him a snake's look surrounded by sallow skin and fire. She was as terrible as she was beautiful, grotesquely so. He wondered if she'd ever been pleasant to look at or if she'd always prompted men to spit on the path she walked on.

"Oh, I can make this very difficult, Kunzite," she assured him darkly. "I can make this harder than anything you've ever endured, and you will beg for death before the end."

He met her threat with stoic silence. He would say no more to her, and he refused to think that it was because he was afraid she was right.

Beryl sighed and suddenly her voice sounded very different. "As you wish."

He choked at the sound of bells emitting from a sickened throat and knew that he should look away. But horror held his gaze as the witch-queen Beryl vanished. A jaundice glow wrapped around her body, shrank her frame, smoothed and lightened her hair. Changed her.

And then it was Venus standing before him, red lips spun into a smile that was poison. Her voice dripped with saccharine.

"Do you really want your lover holding the knife?"

He forced himself to turn away, shutting his eyes so tightly that not even the strongest fingers could have pried them open. He would not see her do this. It was blasphemy.

She clucked her tongue at him, and he shivered, knowing exactly what she looked like. "It doesn't work like that, love. If you won't keep your eyes open then I'll just cut off the lids."

She didn't follow through on the threat, at least not immediately. Instead she drove the knife deep into his stomach. He felt the serrated blade scraping against his ribs, ripping through flesh and muscle, going deep. His tongue bled, and he looked.

Her eyes were wrong, rayed with gold but not glowing, and there was hate mixed with the desire. Either that or the pain made him nauseous. "You will watch your dearest bring you to the brink of death, and it will break you. You must fall to thrive, Kunzite." Her smile widened. It glittered like a sword-blade, shining and terrible. "I would never let you die, my love."

And so it continued, on and on for what must have been hours. Promises that once were sacred danced around his ears like gypsies, tempting and confusing as red poured from his veins. He was stretched so thin he thought he would break, and then she healed him with shadows, patching skin together and wiping away the scars. Then she would begin anew. It was always worse than before.

But a witch's patience only lasts so long, and finally she threw the knife to the ground, flame in her blue-gold eyes. "Fall."

He laughed, and he knew then that he was failing. "Never," he wheezed, his throat so dry that he would have tasted bile to soothe it.

Her fists clenched and her shoulders hunched, a gesture he had seen Venus do before, but this one was without grace. Beryl lacked much. "Never is an awfully long time, Kunzite. The demons cry out for sustenance, and I will not be denied my bounty."

Kunzite would have shaken his head, but he could hardly lift it. "You don't understand."

Seeing his trouble, she grasped his chin with one hand, her nails digging in. She met his gaze, and if he had been a lesser man, he would have trembled. "Enlighten me."

"You may succeed in this," he admitted, hating himself. "You may turn me and you may finish with the others. You might gain all of Earth for your skirmishes and you might attack the moon. But you'll never win."

She shook, a mountain quaking from a tiny blow. "What possible delusion could you be under?"

He smiled.

"She'll kill me first."

The body of Venus left him then, and he was left with only Beryl in all of her unrighteous anger, shrieking in his face. The dagger was in her hand and at his throat, slicing across. He coughed and gasped with blood spilling down his chest and on to the floor. She fumed as though a tempest were in her chest, and though he did not beg for death, he wished she would not heal him and let him go.

His heart was on the floor when she raised the darkness to seal the skin.

Once, Jadeite told him that illusion was the first of all pleasures.

It wasn't enough.


End file.
